Despite Chipotle’s recent experiments with robot-enhanced makelines, tortilla fryers and avocado peelers, the fast-casual chain’s kitchens haven’t really changed much over three decades.
But that’s about to change.
This year, Chipotle is ushering in a new era of kitchen modernization with four new pieces of equipment that are expected to be game changers as the chain pushes toward its goal of reaching 7,000 units in North America.
It’s not about completely revamping kitchen processes and procedures, said Haris Khan, Chipotle’s vice president of operations. But the kitchen upgrades Chipotle is in the process of making across its 3,700-restaurants will reduce complexity and simplify the team member experience.
“It enables them to focus on what they do best, which is developing their teams, remaining guest obsessed, and preparing and serving that exceptional food with phenomenal hospitality,” he said.
The moves are also designed to help Chipotle reach its goal of achieving an average unit volume over $4 million.
For Chipotle, 2024 was the year of testing, and now the chain is moving forward with a rollout schedule that will bring change to kitchens systemwide through the balance of the year.
Here’s what’s coming:
The produce slicer.
Walk into any Chipotle first thing in the morning, and it will likely look like a farmers market, said Khan. There is quite a bit of fresh produce to prepare for cooking, and the daily slicing and dicing can be cumbersome. It’s a lot of manual, repetitive tasks, he said.
In the past, Chipotle team members have used a cheese grater to process produce. But, working with a vendor, the chain has developed a countertop unit that can slice and dice produce, like bell peppers, jalapenos and eventually diced onions that go into dishes like the fajitas, salsas and guacamole.
Team members will still use a knife and cutting board to “box cut” the produce before it goes into the slicer. But the new equipment will save hundreds of cuts and chops, and will free team members up to get the makeline set up and ready to go at the start of service. The slicers can be sanitized between types of produce, and components go in the dishwasher.
Khan said the company showed a video of the slicers at an all-managers conference last March, and it got a standing ovation.
“The general managers, field leaders and team directors in the audience went wild,” he said. “This is one of those value-added pieces of innovation that will truly impact how they work on a daily basis.”
Chipotle has the new slicers in a few hundred units now, and they are being rolled out on a regional basis, because there is some training involved. The goal is to have them in all units by the end of the year.
The clamshell-style plancha cooks faster. | Photo courtesy of Chipotle.
The dual-sided plancha.
During live production hours, the team member at the plancha has the most complex position, said Khan. That team member has to be skilled at multi-tasking, watching quality, pacing, temperature controls and the line needs—in other words, it’s real cooking.
The new dual-sided planchas simplify that process, he said. It also reduces the cook time on chicken by about 75% and for steak by about 50%, and the resulting product is juicier, more tender and with the right amount of char, he said. “It’s gold standard, every single time, with consistency.”
It’s also about eight-inches smaller than the traditional plancha while boosting capacity by about 300%. Chipotle first piloted the equipment in five restaurants, then expanded the test to 10. Last year, the new planchas were in 84 restaurants, and now all new units opening in the fourth quarter will have them.
These new planchas are a bit pricier, however, and Chipotle is still evaluating the economic model. “But the benefits outweigh that initial capital investment cost, and the efficiencies that come from it,” he said.
Now Chipotle is including the dual-sided planchas in a “high-efficiency equipment package” that is in a phased rollout, along with the two pieces of equipment below.
The dual-vat fryer.
Chipotle produces a lot of tortilla chips in house, along with the crispy taco shells. Every morning, a team members fries hundreds of bags of chips.
The new fryers have two vats, which make that process much faster. Someone still has to do the frying, but it takes less time. And, if one side of the fryer goes down, there’s still another to keep up with tortilla chip needs. And Khan said having two fryer vats could also open doors to menu innovation.
Chipotle is also still considering the automated tortilla fryer, named Chippy, that was being explored last year. Khan said the company is still looking at whether it could fit into the back-of-house ecosystem. “It’s still a work in progress,” he said.
Chipotle's new rice cookers can make white and brown rice at the same time. | Photo courtesy of Chipotle.
The three-pan rice cooker.
Chipotle has long worked with big rice pots. After the rice is cooked, team members move the ingredient onto the line, wash the pot, and start again, perhaps with brown rice. But that meant sometimes restaurants would run out of one type of rice or the other, and then they were blocked from making more until the batch was finished.
The three-pan rice cooker will allow units to make brown and white rice at the same time, and the step of transferring the rice to the line is streamlined, removing another repetitive task.
The rice cookers are going into all new restaurants this year as part of the standard equipment package (the chain plans to open between 315 and 375 units in 2025). And it will be rolled out as part of the high-efficiency equipment package, along with the new plancha and fryer, so team members can be trained on all three pieces of equipment.
Taking a phased-in approach “gives you the luxury of hitting pause and reassessing or evaluating as you need it,” Khan said.
There are more tools coming that Khan says will further free up team members. Chipotle is introducing an AI-fueled hiring platform that can reduce the amount of time needed to hire a new employee by as much as 75%, for example.
There’s also the Hyphen makeline, which is still in the design phase of the stage-gate testing process. The automated makeline was tested in a restaurant, and now is in the company’s Cultivate Center in Newport Beach, California, where it is being tweaked by a cross-functional team.
It will likely go back into a restaurant for further testing (and maybe even be tweaked some more) before moving to the next step in the process.
Likewise, the Autocado—a co-botic piece of equipment that cores and peels the avocados that go into the hand-made guacamole—is also being worked on at the Cultivate Center. More time will be needed to determine whether that piece gets rolled out.
Khan noted that these innovations began while current CEO Scott Boatwright was COO, leading the operations team. Now it helps to have a CEO who has long “had a pulse on the logistics side of the business,” he said.
“Scott always understood what we were doing, and what we were setting out to do, and how it would fit into our restaurants,” said Khan.